Industry does what it wants to do. People try to take them to court or lobby their representatives and get treated as "insurgents" literally.

Recordings of a gas industry conference at which public relations
managers are told to study the Army’s counterinsurgency manual — because
“we are dealing with an insurgency” when it comes to protesters and
angry homeowners — are both hilarious and horrifying. Mr. Fox’s account
of the Pennsylvania government’s hiring of a private company to monitor
fracking protesters, an episode not widely covered outside the state, is
particularly valuable.

And, in the end, whatever progress the "insurgents" think they might have made is eventually just vetoed by the puppet government anyway. (Seriously, this is exactly what happened.)

In a series of 2007 interviews explaining his motivation for
launching Bulletproof Securities out of his existing real estate
business, owner Tom Perrella (who we profile here)
pointed to the example of 9/11. “We see things changing and the
threats coming here. And it’s something that is going to be more
frequent in the future … There’s no way our government can secure and
protect with the situation we’re in. We’re trying to bridge the gaps
between private security contractors and local government and law
enforcement.”

Private security services are nothing new. But the trend to more
paramilitary types of protection in an era of demonstrably diminished
risk is something new. In addition, as our society becomes economically
stratified, with a tiny segment living in a wildly different world than
everyone else, you have some rational need for security but also the
desire for security chic as another accoutrement of wealth or
conspicuous consumption.

But before we get too sidetracked, the point of all this is I don't have much hope that the legal process will ever coerce BP to pay what is necessary to fix the dying Louisiana coast. And given everything I just described above, I think I'm pretty justified there. I know the ongoing litigation is everyone's One Cause For Hope in this regard. But all that we know about politics and precedent suggests that ultimately BP will be OK and we won't.

In the meantime, though, there's plenty of money to skim out of the process. Yesterday Dambala published another post about suspicions that insider attorneys have been manipulating the claims process in a way that may ultimately squeeze out far too many legitimate claimants. I can't speak to that directly until I understand more about who precisely benefited from the supposed queue jumping. For instance, this commenter suggests that we look at the specific circumstances of the clients for clues as to why their claims were resolved when they were.

But it is worth noting that Damabala's post was in response to a New York Times article where we find major media already siding with a multi-national oil company against the people of Louisiana. Dambala concludes,

Well, this poor, little company that is being taken advantage of has
decimated the economy, ecology and culture of this state....and the
damage continues to this day, with no end in sight. If Mr. Nocera wants
to fly down here and take a tour of the Louisiana coast, I'd be happy
to show him the damage that has been done and what continues to unfold.
I can pull up over 100 blog posts on this blog, and others, that
document it...much of it on video. More importantly, I can drive him to
the people that are suffering and show him the irreparable damage
that's been done to our environment.

A distinction needs to be drawn between the
lawyers/judge(s)/politician(s), that comprise the PSC/DHECC vis-a-vis
the hard working people of the Gulf Coast, Louisiana folk, in specific.
These two classes of people mix like oil and water (forgive me).

What we have in this article,
is a monkey howling in a tree, throwing turds at one pack of hyenas in
defense of another pack. Never mind the slaughter that's taking place
underneath.